AARE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS 2008

No Country for Young People? Anxieties in

Australian Society and Education
Noel Gough
La Trobe University

Abstract
Australia is often portrayed as a place in which young people are in jeopardy. In 19th
century literature and art, the recurring motif of a child lost in “the bush” became an
increasingly significant dimension of European settlers’ experiences of Australia,
whereas during the latter half of the 20th century analogous cultural narratives
shifted towards urban environments and the plight of young people endangered by
their parents’ generation. In contemporary popular culture, Australia’s cities and
suburbs are places where children are aborted, abandoned, exploited, murdered or
never conceived. Like the bush-lost children before them, these “at risk” young people
symbolise adult fears of self, society, and the future. My concern is that the most
common public policy response to these persistent fears and insecurities is to retreat to
a politics of complexity reduction. Many politicians and public opinion leaders see
teachers and schools as being in the vanguard of people and institutions dedicated to
Australian children’s educational ruin, and simplistically seek to “protect” them with
blunt instruments such as back-to-phonics literacy and a national curriculum. I
argue that Australia’s young people are much more seriously endangered by the
symbolic violence of those who position them as docile receptors of whatever schools
and teachers serve up to them, and who treat them as passive screens upon which to
project their own anxieties.

Foreword: Diary of a Bad Year

AARE’s 2007 annual conference began on the day following the election of Kevin
Rudd’s federal Labor government, and I think it is fair to say that his decisive victory
led many members of the Association to approach 2008 with cautious optimism.

The Australian Educational Researcher, Volume 36, Number 2, August 2009 •1

NOEL GOUGH

Any optimism I felt in December 2007 was short-lived, and lasted only a month or two
beyond the Rudd government’s apology to Indigenous Australians on 13 February 2008,
an initiative for which I have unreserved respect and admiration. But on many other
matters that concern me deeply – especially in the areas of education, environment and
the arts – the new government’s words and deeds have increasingly fallen short of
expectations. I sensed quite early in the year that some of my close colleagues were
similarly underwhelmed. For example, I recall that at an ARDEN1 meeting in March
2008, one outcome of a working group’s deliberations on possible futures for
educational research was to ask: how long before Kevin Rudd becomes Tony Blair?

I am disposed to read educational problems and issues intertextually, that is, to

deliberately bring them into intertextual “play” with other cultural texts, such as
popular songs, novels, movies and artworks (see, for example, Gough, 2007a, 2007b).
When I began to reflect on my experiences of being AARE’s President 2008, the text
that immediately sprang to my mind was J. M. Coetzee’s (2007) novel, Diary of a Bad
Year. This choice was very much influenced by my personal experience: from a
professional and academic standpoint, 2008 was one of the most difficult and stressful
years I have endured since I began working as a secondary teacher in 1968. But
putting personal difficulties aside, I would still characterise 2008 more broadly as a
“bad year” for educational researchers and for the education community writ large.
Some dates I would include in a diary of Australian education’s bad year are:
• 31 March 2008: the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the
2008 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification
(ANZSRC) to replace the Australian Standard Research Classification
(ASRC) and the codes previously used for research reporting and grant
applications. As I and other members of the AARE Executive have
pointed out (Goodyear, 2007; Gough, 2008a, 2008b) the new Fields of
Research classifications – and especially the exclusion of many of our
sub-disciplinary specialisations from Division 13 Education – seriously
threatens the integrity of educational research in Australia and fragments
the critical mass of educational researchers in ways that will damage
Australia’s reputation for producing high quality educational research.
• 19-20 April 2008: the much-hyped Australia 2020 Summit marginalised
educators and instrumentalised education by restricting most of the input
to the Summit (and deliberations during it) to the productivity agenda.
• 13 May 2008: in the months before the Rudd Government’s 2008-09
budget was delivered on this day, it had successfully lowered expectations
of any increased funding for higher education pending the reports of the
Cutler and Bradley reviews. The one-off capital renewal funding of $500
million was of course welcome, but the lack of any recurrent replacement

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funding for student facilities and services following the previous

government’s introduction of voluntary student unionism seemed
somewhat mean-spirited.
• 27 August 2008: the Australian Government delivered a cursory,
condescending and contemptuous response to the Top of the Class
report on the House of Representatives Inquiry into Teacher Education.
For example, the Government’s dismissive rejoinder to the report’s
detailed arguments and recommendations for establishing a dedicated
Educational Research Fund was simply to assert: “High-quality research
relating to education is currently funded under the Australian Research
Council’s National Competitive Grants Program”.
• 24 November 2008: on ABC radio federal Education Minister Julia Gillard
agrees that “Rupert Murdoch is making a lot of sense” in calling
Australia’s public education a “disgrace”, “a waste of human promise”, “a
drain on our future workforce” and “a moral scandal”. She is also
“impressed” by New York schools’ chancellor Joel Klein’s education
reforms, especially in regard to school league tables, which she believes
had produced “remarkable outcomes”.2

I will refrain from continuing this litany of disappointment but, before I put Diary of a
Bad Year aside, I will share a comment that Coetzee offers on contemporary universities:
It was always a bit of a lie that universities were self-governing
institutions. Nevertheless, what universities suffered during the 1980s and
1990s was pretty shameful, as under threat of having their funding cut
they allowed themselves to be turned into business enterprises, in which
professors who had previously carried on their enquiries in sovereign
freedom were transformed into harried employees required to fulfil
quotas under the scrutiny of professional managers. Whether the old
powers of the professoriate will ever be restored is much to be doubted.
In the days when Poland was under the Communist rule, there were
dissidents who conducted night classes in their homes, running seminars
on writers and philosophers excluded from the official canon (for
example, Plato). No money changed hands, though there may have been
other forms of payment. If the spirit of the university is to survive,
something along those lines may have to come into being in countries
where tertiary education has been wholly subordinated to business
principles. In other words, the real university may have to move into
people’s homes and grant degrees for which the sole backing will be the
names of the scholars who sign the certificates. (pp. 31-2)3

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It seems possible to me that something very like this is already taking place in the
Interwebs. To extend Coetzee’s example, there is already a Plato list,4 the purpose of
which is “to support thoughtful discussion about the philosophy and the dialogues of
Plato”. This is one of a number of lists hosted by The Free Lance Academy,5 which seeks
“to create opportunities for serious, committed intellectual inquiry outside the university,
primarily by means of online media”. Perhaps what Coetzee calls “the spirit of the
university” will survive by moving into Yahoo groups and similar Interwebs-based sites.
These forums are not necessarily competing for universities’ business (the competitive
rewards systems of contemporary industrial societies will ensure that) but they might –
and should – influence the ways that universities conduct their core business.

Australia: The Country of Lost Children

I turn now to the central theme of this essay which, in terms of one of Gilles Deleuze
and FÈlix Guattari’s (1987) conceptual creations, can be understood as a “line of flight”
(pp. 9-10) that takes off from Ethan and Joel Coen’s (2007) movie, No Country for Old
Men. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s (2005) novel of the same name, No Country
for Old Men is a crime thriller that tells the story of a botched drug deal and the violent
cat-and-mouse drama that ensues as the protagonists crisscross each other’s paths in
the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas.6

No Country for Young People is a “mind movie” – a playful figment of my imagination.

I now imagine it starring Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Peter Garrett playing themselves,
but when I first cast it in 2007 it starred John Howard, Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop.
My imagined movie thus begins in the period before the Rudd Government was elected
and draws attention to the several continuities between the Howard and Rudd
governments’ approaches to education. No Country for Young People is not a crime
thriller, although it refers to accusations of criminality and has lashings of symbolic
violence. It is a story of botched educational ideals and the political melodramas that
ensue as multiple stakeholders crisscross each other’s paths in the educational and
social policy landscape of 21st century Australia. But beyond this slightly stretched
comparison, No Country for Young People is primarily a meditation on contemporary
anxieties in Australian education and society.

Bruce Chatwin (1987) alerted me to the proposition that “Australia . . . is the country
of lost children” (p. 129), but it was Peter Pierce’s (1999) monograph, The Country of
Lost Children, that provided the evidence and argument for defensibly portraying
Australia as a place where the innocent young are most especially in jeopardy. Pierce
(1999) traces continuities and discontinuities in the ways that Australian anxieties
about children have been represented in literature, art, cinema, theatre, and popular
media from around 1850 to the present. The first part of his thesis is that during the

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second half of the nineteenth century, in literature and in art, the recurring motif of
a child lost in the bush became an increasingly significant dimension of European
settlers’ experiences.

In Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image, Kim Torney (2005) offers
further evidence that the development of the image of the bush-lost child was
uniquely Australian, and that comparable British-colonised societies were dominated
by images of the captive child – of children kidnapped and kept by Indigenous
people. Australian Aborigines usually feature in stories of bush-lost children as “black
trackers” – a means by which European settlers recovered their children (dead or
alive) from the land. The image of the bush-lost child, and the associated bush search
scenario, rapidly came to be regarded as an affirmation of community, although the
stories themselves often reinforced social divisions and stratifications. For example,
bush-lost children were cast as passive victims and, if they were found alive, their
survival was attributed either to divine intervention or to the actions of their rescuers,
who were usually men (rarely women) and/or Aboriginal trackers working under the
orders of European settlers. Bush-lost children who died (or, worse, were never
found) were understood as warnings against the seductive lure of the Australian bush
and the fragility of life on the margins of European settlement. As Pierce (1999) points
out, one of the literary conventions of the Victorian era was to use a child to
symbolize the future, and these early lost child stories can thus be seen as indicators
of a deep unease about the European presence in Australia.

Pierce argues that in the second half of the twentieth century (and, I would suggest,
continuing into the present) the analogous cultural narratives have shifted to urban
environments and cohered around issues of children who have in some way been
abandoned by their parents’ generation. Pierce argues that the image of the lost child
in both periods reveals a persistent insecurity about Australian people’s understandings
of their location in place/space and time. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, Australian anxieties about children seem to be far removed from the site-
specific, exotic and idiosyncratic “dangers” of the bush. Australia is now one of the
world’s most urbanised nations and, like many other industrialised countries, its cities
and suburbs are places where children are aborted, abandoned, abused, exploited,
murdered or never conceived. Stories about such losses focus not on building or
consolidating a community as it searches for a particular lost child but, rather, on the
fragmentation or disintegration of a community as it attempts to deal with the problems
of abandoned children.

Pierce (1999) argues that in these more recent stories children inhabit a world in which
men, women and social institutions, either through neglect or deliberate intention,
seem to be dedicated to their ruin. In life the children are prey to parental abuse,

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prowling paedophiles, Internet porn peddlers, drug dealers, religious sects, and serial
killers, and in death they are the raw material for sensationalising communal fears
through media-driven (and often politically motivated) moral panics. Like the bush-lost
children before them, these abandoned children symbolise adult fears of the self,
society, and the future, but Pierce also suggests that the lost child re-emerges in late
twentieth century popular culture as the focus of further and more obscure anxieties.
Characters worry about whether their children have a future in Australia, sometimes
asking if succeeding generations of Australians should be brought into being at all.
Doom-laden scenarios concerning global warming, food and energy security, and
other aspects of Australia’s social, economic and environmental sustainability
exacerbate such fears.

Many conservative politicians and journalists appear to advance the view that teachers
and schools (aided and abetted by left-wing intellectuals and postmodernist
academics) are in the vanguard of the people and social institutions that are dedicated
to Australian children’s educational ruin. For example, journalist Luke Slattery – a
sometime editor of The Australian’s Higher Education supplement – has long waged
an obsessive and ill-informed campaign against what he deems to be the “dangers”
posed by critical literacy approaches to teaching texts, with a recent example being
published just one week prior to the AARE 2008 Conference (Slattery, 2008).
However, in order to examine more closely some of the rhetorical moves Slattery
deploys, I will return to one of his earlier diatribes, in which he portrayed the threats
to children as being sufficiently grave to merit a front-page story in The Australian’s
weekend edition. Under the headline, “This little pig goes post modernist”, Slattery
(2005) alerts readers to such “alarming” practices as those endorsed by the Tasmanian
Department of Education in the resources it provides for teachers of English:
In Tasmania, the official school syllabus website describes how its
practitioners “deconstruct the structures and features of texts”; “no longer
consider texts to be timeless, universal or unbiased”; ask “if the text
presents unequal positions of power” and “work for social equity and
change” (p. 1).

To position these practices as reprehensible, Slattery deploys a discourse of fear and

derision (note the use of “scare” quotes in the following excerpts) to insinuate that
critical literacy approaches are deliberate acts of educational deprivation:
For a generation of young readers, Mem Fox’s Feathers and Fools is an
enchanting story about peacocks, swans and the ugliness of war. In the eyes
of the postmodernist critics, however, it is a skilful piece of propaganda for
the cause of male supremacy.

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A teaching guide used in secondary schools around the country

encourages students to “deconstruct” children’s picture books such as
Feathers and Fools and to “unpack” the concealed ideology . . .
Twenty years after postmodern theory stormed university humanities
departments, it is working its way into Australian classrooms, politicising
the study of books, films and emails, now grouped under the catch-all
of “texts”.
The culturally relativist theory, which teaches that there is no such thing
as objective truth, has [been given] . . . new lease of life . . . in secondary
education, under the guise of “critical literacy”.
. . . the growing band of critics of critical literacy say the approach
deprives students of the joy of reading for pleasure, excludes classical
texts and ignores basic literacy skills. (p. 1).

Expressions such as “working its way” and “new lease of life” are devices through
which Slattery manufactures a sense of urgency in ameliorating this alleged deprivation
of students’ joy, pleasure, and enchantment, but the practices he ridicules are far from
new. The teaching guide to which he refers, From Picture Book to Literary Theory
(Stephens, Watson, & Parker, 2003), has evidently been popular with English and
literacy teachers for more than a decade, given that it is the second edition of a book
first published in 1994. The title of Slattery’s article refers to this book’s suggestion that
the story of the Three Little Pigs can be interpreted as being about “the virtues of
property ownership and the safety of the private domain” and that both of these are
“key elements of liberal/capitalist ideology”. Although Slattery passes no explicit
judgment on this interpretation, he clearly wants to encourage his readers to see the
authors of From Picture Book to Literary Theory as mean-spirited, politically correct,
academic killjoys hell-bent on depriving children of innocent pleasures.

Slattery might be surprised to learn that many young readers are already getting a
great deal of pleasure from experiencing deconstructive readings of age-appropriate
texts. For example, David Wiesner’s (2001) The Three Pigs begins in the familiar way,
with three pigs building houses of straw, sticks, and bricks. But the wolf’s huffing and
puffing blows the first pig right out of the story. He talks the other two into joining
him on his adventures and they all fly off on a paper airplane fashioned from a page
in the book. Feedback from parents indicates that quite young children find Wiesner’s
text very satisfying both as a story and as an exploration of the nature of story.

History education has also become a powerful and complex site of public anxiety about
the vulnerability of Australian children, driven in part by former Prime Minister John
Howard’s expressed concern that history in Australia’s schools is being taught with

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“perhaps a little too much of an emphasis on issues rather than on exactly what
happened”, and his opposition to the “attempted rewriting of Australian political history
by our political opponents” (quoted in Clark, 2006, p. 1). Howard’s comments joined a
mounting argument over Australian history that has been dominated since the early
1990s by the so-called “History Wars” or “Black Armband” debate, the latter term having
been coined by historian Geoffrey Blainey (1993): “To some extent the Black Armband
view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had
been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more
unreal and decidedly jaundiced” (p. 11). As Anna Clark (2006) writes: “Howard’s
historical imperative to teach the ‘facts’ is embedded in this wider debate over Australian
history; schoolchildren have been centrally cast as vital but vulnerable receptors of the
national past” (p. 1).

Clark explicitly cross-references her studies of the politics and pedagogy of Australian
history education to Pierce’s (1999) research on the image of the lost child in Australian
popular culture: “Unlike Pierce’s children, the children in my study are not lost – in fact
they are very present – but they are in danger, and the vulnerability that he notes is a
useful comparison” (p. 17). Also, like Pierce, Clark sees children as symbols of
contested futures:
it is apparent that this contest over the past is being fought over a
representation of the future, contained within the image of “the child”.
Its political symbolism is obvious: the child-citizen is at once the nation
and its future. Overwhelmingly, the child forms part of an anonymous,
vulnerable collective that comes in all forms: youth, young people,
Australia’s citizens of tomorrow – they are all “our children” (p. 15).

But I argue that conservative critics of teachers and schools – exemplified here by Luke
Slattery and John Howard – actually put Australian children in danger by deploying the
anonymising, homogenising, and patronising effects of the collective pronoun (our
children), by positioning children as passive receptors of whatever schools and teachers
serve up to them, and by treating children as screens upon which to project their own
anxieties. Howard’s imperative to teach his own rewriting of Australian political history
was one driver of his government’s initiatives towards a national curriculum, which as
we now know, is also an agenda that the Rudd government enthusiastically embraces.
A cartoon by Bruce Petty7 in which John Howard and Julie Bishop confront a group of
school children provides an appropriately cautionary comment:
Bishop (brandishing a thick document): “Do you realise what our National
Curriculum would do for your education?”
Child: “No idea.”
Howard: “Correct.”

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Child “Protection” and Adult Projection: The Henson Case

The issue of treating children as screens upon which to project adult anxieties
received a very public airing in 2008 as a result of the absurd moral panic that erupted
on Thursday 22 May 2008, the day on which one of Australia’s greatest living artists,
Bill Henson, was to have opened his latest photographic exhibition. The media
campaign against Henson began that morning with Miranda Devine’s (2008) column
in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Opening tonight at the elegant Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in the heart of
Paddington is an exhibition of photographs by Bill Henson, featuring
naked 12- and 13-year-olds. The invitation to the exhibition features a
large photo of a girl, the light shining on her hair, eyes downcast, dark
shadows on her sombre, beautiful face, and the budding breasts of
puberty on full display ...(p. 13)

According to David Marr (2008), more than half of the forty-one prints in the exhibition
were “sombre studies of imperial Rome, sarcophagi, dark forests, twilit cloudscapes
and huge heads in close-up. The rest were nudes ...[including] two chaste portraits of
a young boy; and fourteen pictures of [the girl known as] N” (p. 6). Marr notes that
Henson chose the image of N used on the invitation – Untitled (#30) 2007-08 –
“because he thought it was the most alive in the exhibition” (p. 5).8 However, Devine
interpreted Henson’s exhibition (which she had not seen) only in terms of “presenting
children in sexual contexts”, which precipitated further tabloid media interest,
including talk-back radio editorialising, vox-pop interviews with politicians, and
complaints to the NSW Police that some of the images constituted “child pornography”.
The police visited the gallery and removed a number of Henson’s photographs for
referral to the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions and the gallery owner cancelled
the exhibition.

On the following day (Friday 23 May 2008), the front page of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph
was dominated by the headline, CHILD PORN “ART” RAID (bold and caps in
original), superimposed on a photograph of two policemen entering the gallery (inset
with a small photograph of N’s head and shoulders). Above these, another (smaller)
headline claimed: “Victory for decency as police close gallery”.9 Marr (2008) describes
this assemblage of words and images as “a tabloid page one of genius: the heavy-set
coppers heading up the stairs; N’s fragile face turned away in shame; Henson’s name
floating on the wall: the headlines reducing all the rich issues raised by the shutdown
to a simple standoff between art and porn, artists and society” (p. 44).

In the accompanying story, the Telegraph gave Hetty Johnson, the founder and executive
director of the child protection lobby Bravehearts, the first say: “He [Henson] has a

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tendency to depict children naked and that is porn”. According to Marr, Johnson had
never heard of Henson until late in the afternoon of 21 May: “Thirty years of his work
had passed under her radar” (p. 15). Indeed, one of the many puzzles of the Henson
case is why, if “depict[ing] children naked ...is porn”, so many previous examples of it
had escaped the notice of those who would condemn it. For example, Abigail Hadeed,
a Trinidadian artist, won first prize in the 2004 Commonwealth Photographic Awards for
a striking photograph of two young, naked girls in Guyana. Her photograph featured in
a long-running “Best of the Best” exhibition of winning entries from the Awards held at
the Melbourne Immigration Museum from 17 February to 30 July 2006 (a period that
included the 2006 Commonwealth Games).10 Would NSW Premier Morris Iemma have
judged this photograph “offensive and disgusting”, as he is quoted as saying of the
Henson photographs in the Daily Telegraph’s story (p. 4)?

Shortly after 7:00am on 22 May, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appeared on Channel
Nine’s Today show, where host Karl Stefanovic showed Rudd and viewers five images
of N taken from a slideshow posted on News Limited websites the previous night.
Thick black bars covered her nipples and her already heavily shaded pelvic area
(which was also covered by her hands). Across the bottom of the screen was the title:
“Outrage over child-porn art”. After flashing through all five images in less than 20
seconds, Rudd responded as follows to Stefanovic’s invitation to comment: “That’s the
first time I’ve seen them. I think they’re revolting ...absolutely revolting”.11 As Marr
(2008) points out, Rudd’s condemnation went further than any of the other politicians
who commented on the pictures – and did so on the basis of a cursory examination
of corrupted images on a TV monitor:
Rudd was under no obligation to like Henson’s work, but an opportunity
to bring some calm and nuance to the debate was lost in that moment.
“Revolting” is a word Rudd uses sparely. Henson’s photographs join a
serious shortlist including the Bali bombing of 2005 ...the outback deaths
of foreign workers on temporary visas, and child abuse in Aboriginal
communities (p. 47).

I see Rudd’s summary judgment on Henson’s photographs of N as a gratuitous and

irresponsible act of symbolic violence, both against N and also against the innumerable
young people who perennially struggle with the complexities of their identities and
their sexualities and adult responses to them. To assert that mere nudity equates with
pornography, or that every picture of a naked child necessarily constitutes “sexualised”
imagery (as Hetty Johnson insists – see Marr 2008, p. 15), is to deprive young people
of choices, to deny their autonomy in shaping their own embodiment.

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Bioethicist Leslie Cannold, who writes the “Moral Maze” column of the Sunday Sun-
Herald, spoke directly to this issue in an article titled “shame on adults for paranoia
over adolescence”:
we don’t have to share [Hetty Johnson’s] suspicions. Instead, we could
accept the obvious fact that most men are neither pornographers nor
paedophiles. Secure in this knowledge, we could welcome Bill
Henson’s attempt to prise open the complexity of adolescence, and the
response of adults to it. Betwixt and between, neither child nor adult,
the adolescent body and place in society is ambiguous, uneasy and
paradoxical. Beautiful and awkward, vulnerable yet powerful, Henson’s
photographs invite us to consider questions contemporary western
societies struggle to ask, little less answer. Can the budding bodies and
sexuality of adolescents be celebrated without being exploited? Can we
recognise the vulnerability of adolescents, particular girls, without
supporting the victim mentality that accompanies disempowering
conceptions of female sexuality? Can we allow adolescents to feel
proud of their bodies and sexuality, or will we – by condemning as
pornographic the photographing of such bodies – forever insist on
shame?
If our response to those who dare raise such questions is to label them
pornographers and paedophiles, I don’t like our chances.
So the final words of this column are for the young woman featured on
the invitation to Henson’s exhibit. The one those orchestrating the
continuing witch hunt against the artist claim to be so concerned about,
and whose image was among those the Prime Minister labelled,
“[absolutely] revolting”.
You are beautiful, darling. Be proud. Years from now, you’ll still be
admired while those responsible for the current stupidity will be long
gone. Thank you for giving us insight into this complex time in your
life: into who you are and the strong woman you are becoming. Find
it in your heart to forgive adults. It is we, not you, who are in the wrong
(Cannold, 2008).

By exploring the sorts of complex questions to which Cannold refers through the
medium of his internationally acclaimed art, Bill Henson is neither abandoning nor
neglecting young people. Rather, I would argue that his work in bringing these
difficult questions to public attention is more morally defensible than that of many
politicians and policy makers who pretend (or delude themselves) that they are
“protecting” young people by recklessly thrashing around with blunt instruments such
as school league tables and a national curriculum.

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One of the most shameful aspects of the Henson case was the moral cowardice
displayed by people such as Peter Garrett who, as federal Minister for the Arts, had
a responsibility to contribute constructively to the debates generated by one of the
most compelling controversies about the arts in decades. But Garrett released a bland
statement about artists having “a responsibility to operate within the law” and then
withdrew to the sidelines. As Marr (2008) puts it, Garrett was “sheepishly ineffective”:
The Henson row shredded Garrett’s reputation. While it blew, he rang
around arts organisations suggesting vaguely that he was about to make
a statement. It never came. Arts officials, though fearful and silent for the
most part themselves, looked to Garrett for leadership. There was no
sign of that either. Inside and outside the arts world the general verdict
on the minister’s performance during the furore was: piss-weak (p. 75).

Alison Croggon, a mother of three and author of a successful series of novels for young
adults, orchestrated the most effective response from the arts community. Croggon was
one of the hundred “creatives” invited to the Rudd government’s Australia 2020
Summit.12 Her open letter to Rudd and other political leaders, signed by forty-three
prominent members of the arts community, including Cate Blanchett, invited them to
rethink their public comments on Henson’s work. Blanchett was the only woman on
the Summit’s steering committee and, by signing the letter, she not only displayed the
courage that Garrett and others so conspicuously lacked, but also made the letter front
page news across Australia, Britain and the USA.

For the benefit of those readers who did not experience these events at close range, the
daily media frenzy around Henson’s photographs was eventually subdued by the rule of
law on Friday 6 June 2008, when the NSW Police announced that they would not be
laying any child pornography charges against Henson or the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery. This
followed judgements by the federal government’s Classifications Board that the
photographs themselves (as circulated on the Internet) were “mild” or safe for children
(i.e., rated PG or G) and advice from the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions that
any prosecution of Henson or the gallery would be unlikely to succeed (see Griffith &
Simon, 2008; Griffith, 2008).

Complexity Reduction as a Response to Social and

Educational Anxieties
In their thoughtful responses to the Henson controversy, both Cannold and Croggon
foreground the concept of complexity – and complexity is precisely the issue that, in my
mind, links the Henson case with debates about school league tables, back-to-phonics
literacy teaching, and a national curriculum:

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Croggon says she wanted Rudd – “this conservative, Queensland Christian

politician” – to acknowledge the complexities of the debate he had
inflamed. “For some years I’ve thought the principal struggle in public
discussion is between those who say, “No, hang on, things are complex”
and those who just want to address them in these utter simplicities” (Marr,
2008, p. 78).

I agree with Croggon, and further suggest that the most common public policy response
to fear, anxiety and insecurity is to retreat to a politics of complexity reduction.

At this point I cannot resist making a recursive loop back to Coetzee’s (2007) Diary
of a Bad Year. He refers to a recent US court ruling that public schools in a
Pennsylvania district may not use science classes to teach the account of the universe
known as Intelligent Design, and in particular may not teach it as an alternative to
Darwinism. Coetzee explicitly distances himself from the Intelligent Design movement
but admits that he continues to find evolution by random mutation and natural
selection “not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex
organisms come into being”:
People who claim that behind every feature of every organism lies a history
of selection from random mutation should try to answer the following
question: Why is it that the intellectual apparatus that has evolved for
human beings seems to be incapable of comprehending in any degree of
detail its own complexity? ...I cannot see what evolutionary advantage this
combination gives us – the combination of insufficiency of intellectual
grasp together with consciousness that the grasp is insufficient (p. 69).

Coetzee’s example is an equally powerful refutation of Intelligent Design: an organism

deliberately built to be incapable of comprehending its own complexity would surely
be a unequivocal example of Unintelligent Design. However, as an educator I am not
interested in debates about whether or not we are genetically programmed to
comprehend complexity in ourselves or in any other phenomena, because I am
disposed to believe that humans can learn to comprehend complexity and use it in
generative ways to improve education and society. To do that, we must also learn to
recognise and resist the default tendency to comply with the hegemonic politics of
complexity reduction.

Complexity theorising invites us to understand our physical and social worlds as

open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent, and to be suspicious of mechanistic
models that assume linear thinking, control and predictability. If we accept that there
are limits to predictability and control, then we can understand that educational
processes are necessarily characterised by gaps between “inputs” (policy, curriculum,

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NOEL GOUGH

pedagogy) and “outputs” (learning) (see Biesta, 2004). These are not gaps to be
“filled” but sites of emergence. The concept of emergence invites us to recognise that
knowledge, understanding and reality emerge through educational processes (rather
than being simply represented in and through education), and also that individuals
emerge in and through educational processes in unique and unpredictable ways. As
Gert Biesta (2006) argues, education is not only about qualification (the transmission
of knowledge and skills) and socialisation (the insertion of individuals into existing
social, cultural and political orders), but should also be characterised by a concern for
the “coming into presence” of unique, individual beings. In this sense, complexity
provides a useful vocabulary for understanding education, in an educational way (see
also Osberg & Biesta, 2007; Osberg, Biesta, & Cilliers, 2008).

The current policy initiatives around national curriculum and school accountability
and transparency seem to me to be paradigmatic instances of complexity reduction
in education. For example, I get no sense from the recently released framing papers
for English, History, Mathematics and Science that the knowledges, understandings
and realities on which these disciplines focus emerge through educational processes.
On the contrary, the framing papers seem more like cargo manifests – packing lists
that prescribe the contents of shipping containers that will be unpacked by schools
across the nation. Nor do these documents invite any consideration of how they might
constrain or enable the unpredictable emergence of unique, individual young people
who are not merely “qualified” and socialised to take their predetermined place in the
existing socioeconomic order.

There is nothing particularly esoteric about complexity – indeed, it has characterised

the interests and activities of mainstream scientists for many years, although you would
never know that from reading the National Science Curriculum Framing Paper. Science
from Newton’s era until the late nineteenth century focused on the material structure
of simple systems but, since then, many of the objects of mainstream scientific inquiry
have been the informational structures of complex systems, including protein folding
in cell nuclei, task switching in ant colonies, the nonlinear dynamics of the earth’s
atmosphere and far-from-equilibrium chemical reactions. Yet there is no mention of
complexity as a scientific concept in the framing paper, and the word “complex” only
appears in passages that reinforce reductionism, such as, “The natural world is
complex but can be understood by focusing on its smaller components”. That, of
course, is a guaranteed way of misunderstanding many natural phenomena.

Complexity also offers a different perspective on what is or appears to be not complex,

and can therefore help us to understand order, structure, regularity, causality and
permanence differently. This partly has to do with distinctions within complexity
theorising, such as between closed and open systems (i.e., systems that do not interact

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 AARE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS 2008

or exchange information with their environment and systems that, for their existence,
depend on such interchange and through this both change themselves and their
environment) and between weak and strong emergence (see Osberg & Biesta, 2007).
But the important question that complexity theorising helps us to ask is how
complexity reduction is achieved, and more particularly to ask who reduces complexity
for whom and in whose interest?

For example, one of Biesta’s (2008) theses on the politics of complexity reduction in
education concerns the effects of retrospective complexity reduction:
Complexity reduction in education not only happens prospectively
(through the reduction of initial variables) but also retrospectively (through
backwards selection of particular trajectories). One of the most explicit
examples of retrospective complexity reduction in education is assessment,
because assessment validates some learning trajectories and invalidates
others but always does so “after the event.” Because education is a
recursive system, the anticipation of assessment also reduces complexity.
In this way assessment also functions prospectively in the reduction of
complexity (p. 2).

In much the same way, the anticipation of school league tables will prospectively reduce
complexity in school systems. The question we must ask is: who benefits from this form
of complexity reduction? Who benefits from “naming and shaming” poorly performing
schools where socioeconomic background and inadequate funding produces predictable
outcomes? Under the inequitable system set up by John Howard, government schools’
share of funding declined from 43% to 35% and is forecast to fall to 34% by 2011.13 As
Kenneth Davidson (2008) writes, the great political virtue of Gillard’s plan to publish a
rating system for schools is that:
it allows governments without any real commitment to raising the standard
of poorer schools to appear to be doing something.
This is bad enough in Britain and the US where the overwhelming
proportion of students go to public schools and the middle class cannot
escape its responsibilities to the system. It is toxic when it is applied to the
Australian system of education apartheid that allows the middle class to
avoid its responsibilities to public education and provides a financial
incentive to do so.

Davidson’s choice of the term “toxic” reminds me of some of its synonyms – sickening,
nauseating, revolting – and that the policies he describes might be much more
deserving of condemnation as absolutely revolting than any of Henson’s representations
of young people’s bodies.

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NOEL GOUGH

Afterword: What Country for Young People?

In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, No Country for Old Men “demonstrates how pitiful
ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice”.14 In this instance,
“implacable injustice” is represented by a sociopathic assassin who seems to be a 1980s
equivalent of the character of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s (1957) film, The Seventh Seal.
This character’s role as an inexorable force of destruction is captured in the emphatic
words of one of the movie’s posters, namely: “YOU CAN’T STOP WHAT’S COMING”
(caps in original).15 Can we – us old[er] men and women of AARE – stop “what’s coming”
if “the Australian system of education apartheid” (as Davidson calls it) is allowed to
continue? I believe that we have a responsibility to the young people of this country to
deploy (or invent) the forms and modes of educational research that might illuminate
the blind spots and ameliorate the deep flaws in some of the more “revolting” aspects
of the Rudd government’s education “revolution”.

Unless we do, Australia will remain the country of lost children and abandoned young
people.

Endnotes
1
Australian Research Directors in Education Network
2
I prefer Michael Leunig’s interpretation of Murdoch’s hypocrisy, as expressed in his
cartoon in The Age (28 November 2008), which can be viewed at: http://images
.theage.com.au/ftage/ffximage/2008/11/27/svCARTOON_NOV28_gallery__575x400
.jpg (accessed 22 June 2009). See also Kenneth Davidson’s (2008) thoughtful and
evidence-based rebuttal of Gillard’s views.
3
See also Azar Nafisi’s (2003) account of teaching banned Western literature in her
home in Iran following her dismissal as a university professor.
4
See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plato/ (accessed 22 June 2009)
5
See http://www.freelance-academy.org/ (accessed 22 June 2009)
6
I illustrated my address with many visual images, such as a poster for the movie,
No Country for Old Men, and posters I designed for my imaginary movie, No
Country for Young People. These images contain material that might be copyright,
so they are not reproduced here. However, the complete PowerPoint presentation
(including the full text of my address as delivered) can be accessed at
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/oent/Staff/gough_papers/noelg_AARE08_Prez_ppt(with
%20notes).pdf
7
http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2007/04/15/svCARTOON_gallery__470x336.
jpg (accessed 22 June 2009)

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 AARE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS 2008

8
A selection of photographs from the exhibition can be viewed at the Roslyn Oxley9
website: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/18/Bill_Henson/1098/ (accessed 22
June 2009). Untitled (#30) 2007-08 can be viewed in several places, e.g.,
http://www.dailyserving.com/art/Bill-Henson-3.jpg (accessed 22 June 2009).
9
An image of this part of the Daily Telegraph’s front page can be viewed at
http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/controversy_in_sydney/ (accessed 22 June
2009). A black-and-white copy of the whole front page is reproduced in Marr (2008,
p. 45).
10
http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Festival+Melbourne2006/Performances/profiles
/Commonwealth+Photographic+Awards+-+Best+of+the+Best.htm (accessed 22 June
2009)
11
For a more complete account of Rudd’s response see Marr (2008, pp. 46-7), from
which this brief description is abridged.
12
For details of the Summit go to www.australia2020.gov.au (accessed 22 June 2009)
13
New Commonwealth funding arrangements announced at a COAG meeting on 28
November 2008 provide some additional funding for all schools but do not appear
to address these inequities.
14
As quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, 8 November 2007 at: http://rogerebert.
suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071108/REVIEWS/711080304/1023
(accessed 22 June 2009)
15
See, e.g., http://www.youknow-forkids.com/images/nocountryforoldmen/nocountry
foroldmenposter3.jpg (accessed 22 June 2009)

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